^w. 



















... . '^-^ 







"oV^ 







.^'\ 



•"^■i" 

, .^'% 












4 o^ 




RECOLLECTIONS 

OF 

OSCAR WILDE 



RECOLLECTIONS 

OF 

OSCAR WILDE 

BY 

ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 
ANDRE GIDE AND FRANZ BLEI 

TRANSLATION AND INTRODUCTION 
BY 

PERCIVAL POLLARD 



1906 

JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY 

BOSTON AND LONDON 



^f 



\\ 



.t1 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Tw« Copies Receivad 

NOV 19 1906 

, Cspyrljrht Entry 

<7fejL.t! /.^ "!^^ 

CLASS n XXCuNo. 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1906, 
By Percival Pollard 



The Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass. U^A. 



CONTENTS 

Introduction 

By Percival Pollard . 7 

Recollections 

By Andre Gide ... 25 
Recollections 

Ernest La Jeunesse . . 67 
Recollections 

By Franz Blei .... 89 



INTRODUCTION 

BY 

PERCIVAL POLLARD 



INTRODUCTION 

STROLLING in the rare sunshine that 
visited BerHn in the spring of 1905, 
chance took me into a quaint Httle book- 
shop that faces what was once the work- 
shop of venerable Joseph Joachim. There, 
among that Htter of old and new, in all 
tongues, I found crystallised what much 
other observation had already hinted. 
Namely, that upon the continental liter- 
ature concerning itself primarily with 
formal art no exotic influence was more 
noticeable than that of Oscar Wilde. 
Outside influence upon the German 

9 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

theatre was on every hand. Farces from 
the French, dismal stuff from Scandi- 
navia, and comedies by Bernard Shaw 
and J. M. Barrie, were taking their 
turn with Hauptmann, Sudermann, Max 
Halbe, Hartleben and Schnitzler in the 
repertoires of the leading German 
theatres. But the piece that was being 
played oftenest, on both sides of the 
Rhine, was Oscar Wilde's "Salome.'* 
When you went beyond the theatre, ey- 
ing the windows of the booksellers, you 
saw Wilde's name everywhere, — his 
"De Profundis" was the most famous 
book of the season in Berlin ; at any rate, 
the booksellers seemed to intimate so; 
they positively plastered their showcases 
and windows with Wilde literature. 

Much of this Wilde literature was but 
repetition of what, despite the whilom 

10 



INTRODUCTION 



aversion from this writer's work here and 
in England, is already fairly familiar to 
us. One curious little book I came upon, 
however, of such intimate, melancholy 
interest, that I determined some day to 
turn it into English. This I have now 
done. 

In introducing the work of the three 
contributors to this little book, two 
Frenchmen and one German, I would 
premise that there must be many readers 
who have been astonished to find in the 
country of Gartenlaube literature and 
Rheinhold Begas statues such evident 
sympathy for a talent like Wilde's, The 
tremendous modernisation that has come 
over German art and letters has by no 
means been generally heralded. Only 
the barest facts may here be hinted. 

The movement typified in England by 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

the Yellow Book, in America by the Lark, 
the Chap-Book, and similar attempts 
away from the academic, had a few years 
later its German echo. In art a whole 
school of successful men now testifies to 
this influence; in illustration there are 
Jugend and Simplicissimus, conveying to 
the public the work of the younger 
Munich men; in letters there are such 
men as Ernst Von Wolzogen, Frank 
Wedekind, Richard Dehmel, Otto Julius 
Bierbaum, and many others. Just as, 
through Beardsley, Wilde's influence 
upon our illustrative and decorative arts 
— in houses as well as in prints — may 
still be found, so upon a number of Ger- 
man writers, for print and playhouse, the 
Irishman's influence was undoubted. In 
the thought-mode of a number of suc- 
cessful writers of the lighter sort, some of 

12 



INTRODUCTION 



whom were named just now, one could 
mark the flowing of an impetus sprung 
from the author of "Salome." 

A year later, in the spring of this pres- 
ent year, one found the European vogue 
of Wilde still spreading. In Berlin, "An 
Ideal Husband" was on the boards of the 
Kleine Theatre; Vienna was issuing a 
Complete Edition; in Florence, Leonardo 
Azzarita was pointing out the Italian 
interest in "De Profundis," just as, in 
Madrid, Gomez Carillo had been giving 
fascinating glimpses of the author of 
"Salome." These glimpses I would well 
have liked to include as a chapter in this 
book, side by side with the glimpses of 
Messrs. Gide, La Jeunesse, and Blei. But 
the limits set for this brochure forbid, 
and I must content myself with the brief- 
est of extracts from what Carillo gave his 



13 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

Spanish readers. It is with "Salome" 
that these extracts deal; inasmuch as 
that sombre play has but in this summer 
of 1906 been for the first time offered to 
the London public — offered, and, if we 
may believe Mr. Max Beerbohm, refused 
as too serious ! — these particulars can 
scarce fail of interest: 

In those days, Carillo wrote, Wilde's 
thoughts were busied only with the lustful 
dance of Salome. "You are from Madrid?" 
And, after a long pause, "If for no other 
reason, I have always longed to go to Spain 
that I might see in the Prado Titian's Salome, 
of which Tintoretto once exclaimed: 'Here at 
last is a man who paints the very quivering 
flesh!' . . ." No day went by without his 
talking to me of Salome. Now it was a pass- 
ing woman who started him dreaming of the 

14 



INTRODUCTION 



Hebraic princess; again he stood for hours 
before the jewelers' windows building for him- 
self the ideal combination of gems with which 
to festoon the body of his idol. One evening 
he asked me suddenly, in the midst of the 
street, "Don't you think she is better en- 
tirely naked? " He was thinking of Salome. 
*'Yes," he went on, "absolutely naked. But 
strewn with jewels, all ringing and tinkling 
in her hair, on her ankles, her wrists, her 
throat, enclosing her hips and heightening 
with their myriad glittering reflections the 
unchastity of that unchaste amber flesh. For 
of an unknowing Salome, who is a mere tool, 
I refuse to hear a word; no, no, Salome 
knows. . . ." Another time his Salome was 
all chastity. I recall an evening when Wilde 
came from the Louvre, and began to speak to 
me of a gentle princess who danced before 
Herod as if by a call from Heaven, that she 

15 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

might finally be able to demand punishment 
on the lying enemy of Jehovah. "Her quiv- 
ering body," he said, "is tall and pale as a 
lily; nothing sexual is in her beauty. Veils 
woven by angels conceal her slenderness, her 
blond hair flows like molten gold over her 
shoulders. . . ." Once we were at Jean Lor- 
rain's. Before the picture of a beheaded 
woman, a very pale head, Wilde exclaimed, 
"Why, that is Salome!" And at once he 
imagined a princess who brings her lover the 
head of John, and then immediately sends 
her own head also, because she fancies herself 
despised by the young man. "It is exactly 
like that," he whispered. "A Nubian gospel 
discovered by Boissiere tells of a young phi- 
losopher, to whom a Jewish princess makes a 
present of an apostle's head. The youth says 
to her smilingly, "What I had rather have is 
your own head, sweetheart." On that she 

i6 



INTRODUCTION 



goes away, pale, and that evening a slave 
brings the young philosopher on a golden 
plate the poor little head of his sweetheart. 
The scholar says, "Why all this blood?" and 
goes on reading Plato. "Don't you think 
that is Salome?" . . . "Write that!" said 
someone. Wilde actually began a story with 
the title "The Double Beheading." He soon 
tore the sheets up, and thought of a poem. 
That, too, he relinquished, and chose drama. 
, . . Only Gustave Moreau's portrait un- 
veiled for him the soul of the dancing princess 
of his dreams. Many a time he simply re- 
peated Huysman's words, "She is nearly 
\ naked. In the whirl of the dance the veils 
are unloosed, the shawls are fallen to the 
ground, and only jewels clothe her body. 
The tiniest of girdles spans her hips; between 
her breasts a jewel glitters like a star. . . ." 
Five years later, in prison, in hours of sleep- 



17 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

lessness, of fever and hunger, he mechanically 
repeated to himself the words: "Between her 
breasts a jewel glitters like a star." 

What this Spaniard, Carillo, and the 
three other European continentals com- 
posing this little book have given us in 
glimpses of this man seemed to me of 
peculiar and personal interest. They 
must add to the general understanding. 

If that general understanding comes 
slowly, it comes none the less surely. A 
month after Wilde's death, in January, 
1 90 1, I printed an essay attempting 
definition of his place as artist. Time 
has more than borne out all those fore- 
casts of mine. There is no corner of the 
globe where something of his has not, by 
now, been read or played. Just as his 
writings are indisputably a part of the 



INTRODUCTION 



literature of the nineteenth century, so 
the impress made by the man himself 
belongs in any history of the manners of 
that century. One may conceive that in 
Wilde a perverse sense of loyalty to art 
kept him from ever displaying the real 
depth below his obvious insincerities; he 
had begun by being a public fool; he had 
succeeded in establishing folly as a repu- 
tation for himself; and the rumor of his 
paradoxic brilliance was too secure and 
too amusing for him to risk shattering it 
with glimpses of more serious depths. 
Yet who can read his sonnet, "Helas!" 
appearing in the 1881 edition of his 
Poems, without feeling that under the 
glitter and the pose there was something 
else, something the gay world of London 
knew nothing of? Publicly, Wilde posed 
as a Soul only in the spirit in which that 



19 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

word was then, in the 'Eighties, used in 
English society, as opposed to the Smart; 
he pretended nothing about him was 
genuine; he passed for a symbol of his 
own clever defence of liars; yet in "Ht- 
las'/' the soul gave its cry. 

What he hinted in that sonnet he was 
eventually to prove in his letters from 
prison to Mr. Ross, printed as a book 
under the title "De Profundis." Just 
as Pierre Loti once wrote a Book of Pity 
and of Death, so might "De Profundis" 
be called Wilde's Book of Pity and of 
Life. Just as that book hints the tragedy 
of his prison life, a tragedy more of soul 
than of body, so does this present little 
volume disclose some few facts from the 
man's life after leaving prison. The few 
had perforce to read "De Profundis" in 
the light of their knowledge that its 

20 



INTRODUCTION 



author, after all the resolutions and con- 
clusions in that document, reverted to 
his baser self, and died with his life fallen 
far below the altitude marked in the 
prison letters. That knowledge of the 
few is set forth in concrete, intimate 
manner in the following pages. It is 
true that on some points these documents 
are in conflict; as in the matter of the 
number following Wilde's body to the 
grave. But the glimpses of the man just 
before death, as Ernest La Jeunesse and 
Andre Gide give them in these pages, 
remain incontestably valuable. He died 
and was buried. Whether seven fol- 
lowed the coffm, or thirteen; whether he 
now lies in this cemetery or that; what 
matter? His work lives on. 
^A word or two about the authors with 
whose pages I have taken the liberty of 

21 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

very free translation. M. La Jeunesse 
is one of the wittiest of the younger Pari- 
sians. Much of his work has been on the 
impudent and amusing plane of a Max 
Beerbohm. His volume The Nights, 
The Ennuis, and The Souls of our Most 
Notorious Contemporaries, criticised, 
chiefly by way of parody, all the biggest 
toads in the puddle of French letters; 
Zola, Bourget, Maeterlinck, and Anatole 
France all suffered his scalpel. His book 
of drawings in caricature of such men as 
Rostand, Pierre Louy, Jean Lorrain, 
Barres and Jules Lemaitre, is diverting 
in the extreme. 

Herr Franz Blei is one of the talented 
men connected with the German monthly. 
Die Insel, published in Leipzig three or 
four years ago, under the direction of 
Otto Julius Bierbaum. Bierbaum and 

22 



INTRODUCTION 



Blei occasionally wrote for the stage to- 
gether, and Blei has constantly been to 
the fore in translating for German readers 
the works of such men as Walter Pater, 
Ernest Dowson, and Arthur Symons. 

About M. Gide I regret that I can tell 
you nothing; I prefer to invent nothing. 
The D — referred to in his pages is, of 
course. Lord Alfred Douglas, who mar- 
ried Olive Custance, and whose English 
version of "Salome" has lately been 
issued. 

The hotel-keeper, mentioned on page 
(£, guards to this day the rooms in 
which Wilde died, as a shrine, not with- 
out pecuniary profit. Indeed, visitors 
have had amusing proof of the inex- 
haustible store of relics he commands. 
Percival Pollard. 



23 



RECOLLECTIONS 

OF 

OSCAR WILDE 

BY 

ANDRE GIDE 



RECOLLECTIONS 



THOSE who came to know Wilde 
only in the latter years of his life 
can scarcely, in view of that feeble and 
infirm existence, have had any concep- 
tion of this wonderful personality. It 
was in 1891 that first I saw him. Wilde 
had at that time what Thackeray termed 
the most important of talents, success. 
His gestures, his look, were triumphant. 
So complete was his success that it 
seemed as if it had preceded him, and 
Wilde had nothing to do but follow 
it up. His books were talked about. 

27 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

Plays of his were on at several London 
theatres. He was rich; he was famous; 
he was beautiful. Happiness and hon- 
ors were his. One likened him to an 
Asiatic Bacchus; or to a Roman Em- 
peror, or even to Apollo himself — what is 
certain is that he was radiant. 

When he came to Paris, his name 
traveled from lip to lip; one told the 
most absurd anecdotes about him: 
Wilde was pictured as everlastingly 
smoking gold-tipped cigarettes and stroll- 
ing about with a sunflower in his hand. 
For Wilde had always the gift of playing 
up to those who nowadays fashion fame, 
and he made for himself an amusing 
mask that covered his actual counte- 
nance. 

I heard him spoken of at Mallarme's 
as of a brilliant causeur. A friend in- 

^8 



ANDRE GIDE 



vited Wilde to dinner. There were four 
of us, but Wilde was the only one who 
talked. 

Wilde was not a causeur; he narrated. 
During the entire meal he hardly once 
ceased his narrating. He spoke slowly, 
gently, in a soft voice. He spoke ad- 
mirable French, but as if he tapped a 
little for the words he was using. Hardly 
any accent at all, or just the faintest that 
he chose to adopt, giving the words often 
a quite novel and foreign air. . . . The 
stories he told us that evening were con- 
fused and not of his best. Wilde was 
not sure of us, and was testing us. Of 
his wisdom or his folly he gave only what 
he thought his listeners might like; to 
each he served a dish to suit the taste; 
those who expected nothing of him re- 
ceived nothing or the merest froth; and, 



29 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

since all this was just amusement for 
him, many, who think they know him, 
know him only as an entertainer. 

As we left the restaurant on that occa- 
sion my friends went ahead, I followed 
with Wilde. 

"You listen with your eyes," he said 
to me rather abruptly, "that is why I 
tell you this story: 

"When Narcissus died the pool of his 
pleasure changed from a cup of sweet 
waters into a cup of salt tears, and the 
Oreads came weeping through the wood- 
land that they might sing to the pool 
and give it comfort. 

"And when they saw that the pool 
had changed from a cup of sweet waters 
into a cup of salt tears, they loosened 
the green tresses of their hair, and cried 
to the pool, and said: 'We do not won- 

30 



ANDRE GIDE 



der that you should mourn in this man- 
ner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.' 

"'But was Narcissus beautiful?' said 
the pool. 

'"Who should know that better than 
you?' answered the Oreads. 'Us did 
he ever pass by, but you he sought for, 
and would lie on your banks and look 
down at you, and in the mirror of your 
waters he would mirror his own beauty.' 

"And the pool answered: 'But I loved 
Narcissus because, as he lay on my 
banks and looked down at me, in the 
mirror of his eyes I saw my own beauty 
mirrored.'" 

As I said: before others Wilde wore 
a mask, to deceive, to amuse, some- 
times to anger. He never listened, and 
bothered little about any thought that 
was not his own. If he could not shine 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

quite alone, he withdrew into the shadow. 
One found him there only when one was 
alone with him. 

But so, alone, he began: 

"What have you done since yester- 
day?" 

And as my life had then a very ordi- 
nary routine, what I told about it could 
hardly interest him at all. I rehearsed 
this very ordinary matter, and Wilde's 
frown showed. 

"Really only that?" 

"Really nothing new." 

"Then why tell it? You must see 
yourself that all that is very uninter- 
esting. There are just two worlds; the 
one exists without one ever speaking of 
it; that is called the real world, for one 
does not need to speak of it to perceive 
its existence. The other is the world of 

32 



ANDRE GIDE 



art: one must talk of that, for without 
such talk it would not exist. 

"There was once a man who was be- 
loved in his village for the tales he told. 
Every morning he left the village, and 
when he returned, at evening, the vil- 
lagers, who had tired themselves in 
labor all day long, assembled before him 
and said, — Tell us, now, what you saw 
to-day! He told them: I saw a faun in 
the wood piping a dance to little wood- 
gods. — What else? Tell us! said the 
people. — As I came to the sea I saw on 
the waves three sirens combing their 
green locks with a golden comb. — And 
the people loved him because he told 
them stories. 

"One morning he left the village as 
usual — but as he reached the sea he 
saw three sirens, three sirens on the 



33 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

waves, combing with golden combs their 
green tresses. And as he fared on, he saw 
in the wood a faun, piping before dancing 
wood nymphs. . . . When he reached 
his village that evening and one asked 
him as of old: Tell us! What have you 
seen? he answered: I have seen nothing." 

Wilde paused a little; let the story 
work into me; then: 

"I do not like your lips; they are the 
lips of one who has never lied. I shall 
teach you to lie, that your lips may grow 
beautiful and curved as those of an an- 
tique mask. 

"Do you know what is art and what 
is nature? And the difference between 
them? For after all a flower is as beau- 
tiful as any work of art, so the difference 
between them is not merely beauty. 
Do you know the difference? The work 

34 



ANDRE GIDE 



of art is always unique. Nature, that 
creates nothing permanent, forever re- 
peats itself, so that nothing of what she 
has created may be lost. There are 
many narcisse, so each can live but one 
day. And every time that Nature in- 
vents a new form, she repeats it. A sea- 
monster in one sea knows that its image 
exists in some other sea. When God 
made a Nero, a Borgia, a Napoleon, he 
was only replacing their likes; we do not 
know those others, but what matter? 
What is important is that one succeeded! 
For God achieves man, and man achieves 
the work of art." 

That Wilde was convinced of his 
aesthetic mission was made clear to me 
more than once. 

The Gospel disquieted the pagan Wilde. 
He did not forgive its miracles. Pagan 



35 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

miracles, those were works of art; Chris- 
tianity robbed him of those. 

"When Jesus returned to Nazareth," 
he said, "Nazareth was so changed that 
he did not know the place. The Naz- 
areth of his day had been full of misery 
and tears; this town laughed and sang. 
And as the Lord descended into the town 
he saw flower-laden slaves hastening up 
the white steps of a marble house. He 
went into the house and saw in a jasper 
hall reclining upon a marble couch one 
in whose hair were twined red roses and 
whose lips were red with wine. And 
the Lord stepped behind him, touched 
his shoulder and spoke to him: 'Why do 
you spend your life like this?' The 
man turned around, knew him, and 
said: * I was a leper once, and you healed 
me — how else should I Hve?' 

36 



ANDRE GIDE 



"And the Lord left the house and re- 
turned upon the street. And after a 
Httle while he saw one whose face and 
garments were painted, and whose feet 
were shod with pearls. And after her 
followed a youth, softly, slowly, like a 
hunter, and his coat was of two colors 
and lust was in his eyes. But the face 
of the woman was as the lovely face of 
a goddess. And the Lord touched the 
youth's hand, and said: 'Why look you 
so upon this woman?' And the youth 
turned around, knew him, and said: *I 
was blind, and you restored my sight. 
Upon what else shall I look?' 

"And the Lord approached the woman: 
*The way you go is the way of sin; why 
do you go that way?' And the woman 
knew him, and said: 'The way I go is a 
joyful way, and you forgave me my sins.' 



37 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

''Then the Lord's heart filled with 
sorrow, and he wished to depart from 
the town. And as he came to the gates, 
a youth was sitting by the roadside, 
weeping. The Lord approached him, 
touched his hair, and said to him: 'Why 
do you weep?' 

"And the youth looked up, knew 
him, and said: 'I was dead, and you 
waked me from the dead. What else 
should I do but weep?'" 

"Shall I tell you a secret?" Wilde 
began, another time — it was at Here- 
dia's; he had taken me aside in the 
middle of the crowded salon, and was 
confiding this to me: "Do you know why 
Christ did not love his mother?" — He 
spoke quite softly into my ear, as if in 
shame. Then he made a slight pause, 
took me by the arm, and, suddenly 

38 



ANDRE GIDE 



breaking into a loud laughter: "Because 
she was a virgin!" 

One morning Wilde bade me read a 
review in which a somewhat unskilful 
critic had congratulated him upon the 
fact that he "gave form and vesture to 
his ideas by way of daintily invented 
stories." 

"They imagine," Wilde began, "that 
all ideas come naked into the world. 
They do not understand that I can think 
in no other way save in stories. The 
sculptor does not translate his thought 
into marble; he thinks in marble." 

Wilde believed in a sort of fate in art, 
and that ideas were stronger than men. 
*' There are," he said, "two sorts of 
artists: these offer us answers; those 
offer questions. One must know to 
which of these sorts one belongs; for he 

39 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

who asks is never he who answers. There 
are works of art that stand waiting, that 
one does not understand for a long time, 
for the reason that they offer answers to 
questions that one has not yet put; for 
often the question comes dreadfully long 
after the answer." 

And he said, also: 

"The soul comes old into the body, 
which must age to give her youth. 
Plato was the youth of Socrates." 

Then I did not see Wilde again for 
three years. 

A stubborn rumor that grew with his 
success as playwright ascribed extraor- 
dinary habits to Wilde, about which 
some people voiced their irritation smil- 
ingly, others not at all ; it was added that 
Wilde made no secret of it, and spoke 
of it without embarrassment — some said 

40 



ANDRE GIDE 



he spoke with bravado, some with cyn- 
icism, some with affectation. I was very 
much astonished; nothing in the time I 
had known Wilde had led me to suspect 
this. But already his old friends were 
cautiously leaving him. Not yet did 
one quite disown him. But one no 
longer spoke of having known him. 

An unusual accident brought us to- 
gether again. It was in January, 1895. 
A fit of the blues had driven me to travel, 
seeking solitude rather than change. I 
hurried through Algiers to Blidah; left 
Blidah for Biskra. Leaving the hotel, 
my eyes fall, in weary curiosity, upon the 
black tablet that bears the names of the 
hotel-guests. And next to my own I 
see Wilde's name. I was hungry for 
solitude, and I took the sponge and 
wiped my name out. 



41 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

Even before I reached the station I 
was in doubt as to whether I had not 
acted as a coward, and I had my trunk 
brought back, and re-wrote my name on 
the tablet. 

In the three years since last I had 
seen him — I do not count a very hasty 
encounter in Florence — Wilde had 
changed visibly. One felt less softness 
in his look, and there was something 
coarse in his laughter, something forced 
in his gaiety. At the same time he 
seemed more certain of pleasing, and less 
anxious to succeed; he was bolder, 
greater, more sure of himself. And 
curiously enough he spoke no longer in 
parables; not one single story did I hear 
from him the whole time. 

At first I voiced my wonder at fmding 
him in Algiers. ''I am running away 

42 



ANDRE GIDE 



from art/' he replied, '' I want to wor- 
ship only the sun. . . . Have you never 
noticed how the sun despises all thought? 
He always discourages thought; it flies 
to the shadows. Thought once dwelt 
in Egypt; the sun conquered Egypt. 
Long it lived in Greece; the sun con- 
quered Greece, then Italy, then France. 
To-day all thought is crowded out, 
driven into Norway, and Russia, where 
the sun never comes. The sun is jealous 
of art." 

To worship the sun, that was to wor- 
ship life. Wilde's lyric worship grew 
fierce and dreadful. A destiny deter- 
mined him; he could not and would not 
escape it. He seemed to apply all his 
care, all his courage to the task of exag- 
gerating his fate, and making it worse 
for himself. He went about his pleasure 



43 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

as one goes about one's duty. "It is 
my duty," he said, "to amuse myself 
frightfully." 

Nietzsche did not surprise me so 
much, later, because I had heard Wilde 
say: — "Not happiness! Anything but 
happiness! But pleasure, yes; pleasure, 
joy! One must always want what is 
most tragic." 

As he walked through the streets of 
Algiers, he was the centre of a most 
strange crew; he chatted with each of 
these fellows; they delighted him, and 
he threw his money at their heads. 

"I hope," he said, "that I have 
thoroughly demoralised this town." I 
thought of Flaubert's reply, when he 
had been asked what glory he held most 
worthy — "La gloire de demoralisateur/' 

All this filled me with astonishment, 

44 



ANDRE GIDE 



wonder, and dread. I was aware of his 
shattered condition, of the attacks and 
enmities aimed at him, and what dark 
disquiet he concealed under his aban- 
donment of gaiety. One evening he 
appeared to have made up his mind to 
say absolutely nothing serious or sincere. 
His paradoxes irritated me, and I told 
him his plays, his books, were far from 
being as good as his talk. Why did he 
not write as well as he talked? "Yes,'' 
said Wilde, "the plays are not great; I 
think nothing of them; . . . but if you 
only knew how amusing they are! . . . 
Incidentally, most of them are the re- 
sults of bets. So is 'Dorian Grey.' I 
wrote that in a few days, because one of 
my friends asserted I would never write 
a novel." He leaned towards me and 
added: "Do you wish to know the great 



45 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

drama of my life? I have given my 
genius to my life, to my work only my 
talent." 

Wilde spoke of returning to London; 

the Marquis of Q was abusing him, 

and accusing him of flight. ''But," I 
asked, "if you go to London, do you 
know what you are risking?" 

"That is something one should never 
know. My friends are funny; they ad- 
vise caution. Caution ! How can I have 
that? That would mean my immediate 
return. I must go as far away as pos- 
sible. And now I can go no further. 
Something must happen — something 
different." 

The next morning Wilde was on his 
way to London. 

The rest is well known. That "some- 
thing different" was hard labor in prison. 

46 



ANDRE GIBE 



From prison Wilde came to France. 

In B , a remote little village near 

Dieppe, there settled a Sebastian Mel- 
moth; that was he. Of his French 
friends I had been the last to see him; I 
wished to be the first to see him again. 
I arrived about midday, without having 
announced myself in advance. Mel- 
moth, whom friendship with T 

brought often to Dieppe, was not ex- 
pected back that evening. He did not 
arrive until midnight. 

It was still nearly winter, cold and 
bitter. All day long I mooned about 
the deserted strand, bored and moody. 

How could Wilde have chosen this B 

to live in? This boded no good. 

Night came, and I went into the hotel, 
the only one in the place, where Mel- 



47 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

moth, too, lodged. It was eleven, and 
I had begun to despair of my waiting, 
when I heard wheels. M. Melmoth had 
returned. 

He was numb with cold. On the way 
home he had lost his overcoat. A pea- 
cock's feather that his servant had 
brought him the day before may have 
given him a foreboding of ill luck; he 
expresses himself as fortunate to have 
got off with only the loss of his overcoat. 
He shakes with the cold, and the whole 
hotel is astir to make him a hot grog, 
He scarcely has a greeting for me. He 
does not wish to show his emotion before 
the others. And my own excited ex- 
pectation quiets down as I fmd in Sebas- 
tian Melmoth so completely the Oscar 
Wilde, — not the hard, strained, force- 
ful Wilde of Algiers, but the soft, pliable 

48 



ANDRE GIDE 



Wilde of before the crisis; I feel myself 
set back not two years, but four or five; 
the same arresting look, the same win- 
ning smile, the same voice. 

He lodged in two rooms, the best in 
the house, and had furnished them taste- 
fully. Many books on the table, among 
which he showed me my "Nourritures 
Terrestres," then but just out. On a 
high pedestal, in the shadow, a Gothic 
Madonna. 

We sat at table by lamplight, and 
Wilde sipped his grog. Now, in the 
better light, I note how the skin of his 
face has roughened and coarsened, and 
his hands still more, those hands with 
their fingers still covered by the same 
rings, even the lapis lazuli in its pendant 
setting, to which he was so much at- 
tached. His teeth are horribly decayed. 



49 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 



We chat. I speak of our last meeting 
in Algiers, and if he recalls my then fore- 
telling his catastrophe. '' You must have 
foreseen the danger into which you were 
plunging?" 

"Of course! I knew a catastrophe 
would come — this one or that one. I 
expected it. It had to end like that. 
Think! Going on was impossible. An 
end had to be. Prison has utterly 
changed me. And I have counted on 

that. D is terrible; he will not 

understand my not taking up m^y old 
life; he accuses the others of having 
changed me. . . . But one can never 
take up the same life. . . . My life is 
like a work of art ; an artist never begins 
the same thing twice. My life, before 
I was in prison, was a success. Now it 
is quite ended." 



50 



ANDRE GIDE 



Wilde lit a cigarette. 

"The public is dreadful; it judges only 
by what one has done last. If I returned 
to Paris it would see only the condemned 
man. I shall not appear again until I 
have written a play." — And then, 
abruptly: "Was I not quite right to 
come here? My friends wanted to order 
me South, for rest, for at first I was quite 
unstrung. But I begged them to find 
me a quiet little village somewhere in 
Northern France, where I would see no- 
body, where there is some cold and 
hardly any sunshine. I have all that, 
here. 

"Everyone is very nice to me here, 
especially the clergyman. His little 
church is a great pleasure to me. Think: 
it is called the Church of Our Lady of 
Joy — Isn't that delightful? — And now 



51 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

I am quite sure I shall never be able to 

leave B , for this very morning the 

clergyman has offered me a pew! 

"And the customs officers! How bored 
such people are! I asked them if they 
had nothing to read, and now I am getting 
for them all the novels of the elder Dumas. 
I must stay here, eh? 

"And the children here worship me. 
On the Queen's birthday I gave a feast 
to forty school-children — the whole 
school was there, with the teacher! For 
the Queen's Day! Isn't that delightful? 
. . . You know, I am very fond of the 
Queen. I always have her picture by 
me." And he showed me Nicholson's 
portrait of the Queen pinned to the wall. 
I arise to examine it ; a small bookcase is 
underneath it; I look at the books. I 
wished to induce Wilde to talk more 

52 



ANDRE GIDE 



seriously. I sit down again, and ask 
him, somewhat timidly, if he has read 
the "Recollections in a Morgue." He 
does not reply directly. 

"These Russian writers are extraordi- 
nary; what makes their books so great 
is the pity they put into them. Formerly 
I adored 'Madame Bovary'; but Flau- 
bert would have no pity in his books, and 
the air in them is close; pity is the open 
door through which a book can shine 
eternally. ... Do you know, it was 
pity that kept me from suicide. For the 
first six months I was so dreadfully un- 
happy that I longed to kill myself — 
but I saw the others. I saw their un- 
happiness; it was my pity for them that 
saved me. Oh, the wonder of pity! 
And once I did not know pity.'' He 
said this quite softly and without any 

53 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

exaltation. "Do you know how won- 
derful pity is? I thanked God every 
night, yes, on my knees I thanked Him, 
that He had made me acquainted with 
pity. For I entered prison with a heart 
of stone, and thought only of my own 
pleasure; but now my heart is quite 
broken; pity has entered in; I know now 
that pity is the greatest and loveliest 
thing in the world. . . . And that is why 
1 can have nothing against those who 
condemned me, for without them I 
would not have experienced all this. 

D writes me horrible letters; he 

writes that he does not understand me, 
does not understand my not taking arms 
against the whole world; since all have 
been abominable to me. . . . No; he 
does not understand, cannot understand 
me. In every letter I tell him that our 

54 



ANDRE GIDE 



ways lie apart; his is the way of pleasure 
— mine is not. His is that of Alcibiades; 
mine that of St. Francis of Assisi. . . . 
Do you know St. Francis? Will you do 
me a very great pleasure? Send me the 
best life of our Saviour!" 
I promised; and he went on: 
''Yes — towards the last we had a 
splendid warden, a charming man! But 
for the first six months I was utterly, 
completely unhappy. The warden, then, 
was a horrible creature, a cruel Jew, 
without any imagination." I had to 
laugh at the absurdity of this rapidly 
uttered comment, and Wilde laughed too. 
" Yes, he did not know what to invent 
for our torturing. . . . You shall see 
how void of imagination the man was. 
You must know that in prison one has 
but an hour in the sunshine, that is, one 



55 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

marches around the yard in a circle, one 
after the other, and is forbidden to say a 
word. One is watched, and there are 
dreadful punishments if one is caught 
talking. The novices, who are in prison 
for the first time, can be distinguished 
by their inability to speak without mov- 
ing their lips. For ten weeks I had been 
there, and had not spoken a word to a 
soul. One evening, just as we are mak- 
ing our round, one behind the other, I 
suddenly hear my name spoken behind 
me. It was the prisoner behind me, 
who was saying: 'Oscar Wilde, I pity 
you, for you are suffering more than 
me.' I made the greatest efforts not to 
be observed, and said, without turning 
around: 'No, my friend; we all suffer 
alike.' And on that day I did not think 
of suicide. 

56 



ANDRE GIDE 



" In this way we often talked together. 
I knew his name and what he was in for. 

He was called P , and was a fine 

fellow! But I had not yet the trick of 
speaking with motionless lips, and one 
evening *C. 33!' ( — that was I — ) 'C. 33 
and C. 48 fall out!' We left the rank, 
and the turnkey said: 'You are to go 
before the warden!' And as pity was 
already in my heart I had fear only for 
him; I was even happy that I must suffer 
on his account. — Well, the warden was 

simply a monster. He called P first ; 

he wished to hear us separately — since 
the punishment for the one who has 
spoken first is twice as heavy as for the 
other; usually the former gets a fort- 
night in the dark cell, the latter only a 
week; so the warden wanted to know 
which of us two had been the first. And 



57 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

of course P said he was. And when 

the warden interrogated me presently, 
of course I, too, said it had been I. That 
enraged the man so that his face went 
scarlet, for he could not understand such 

a thing. ' But P declares also that 

he began! I don't understand. . . .' 

"What do you say to that, mon cher? 
He could not understand! He was very 
much embarrassed. 'But I have al- 
ready given him fourteen days. . . / 
and then : ' Very well ! If this is the case, 
you simply both get fourteen days.' 
Splendid, that, eh? The man simply 
had not an atom of imagination.'' Wilde 
was greatly amused; he laughed, and 
went on talking gaily: 

"Naturally, after the fourteen days, 
our desire to talk was all the keener. 
You know how sweet is the sensation of 

58 



ANDRE GIDE 



suflFering for others. Gradually — one 
did not always parade in just the same 
sequence — gradually I managed to talk 
with all of them! I knew the name of 
every single one, his story, and when he 
would be leaving prison. And to each I 
said: The first thing you are to do when 
you come out is to go to the post-office; 
there will be a letter there for you with 
money. . . . There were some splendid 
fellows among them. Will you believe 
me if I tell you that already some three 
of my fellow prisoners have visited me 
here? Is that not wonderful? 

"The unimaginative warden was suc- 
ceeded by a very nice one. Now I 
could ask to read whatever I wished. I 
thought of the Greeks, and that they 
would please me. I asked for Sophocles, 
but he was not to my taste. Then I 



59 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

thought of the writers on religion ; those, 
too, failed to hold me. And suddenly I 
thought of Dante. ... oh, Dante! I 
read Dante every day in the ItaHan, 
every page of him; but neither the Pur- 
gatory nor the Paradise was intended 
for me. But the Inferno! What else 
was I to do but adore it? Hell — were 
we not dwelling in it? Hell, that was 
the prison.'' 

The same night he spoke to me of his 
dramatic scheme of a Pharaoh, and of a 
spirited story on Judas. 

The following morning Wilde took me 
to a charming little house, not far from 
the hotel, that he had rented, and was 
beginning to furnish. Here he meant to 
write his plays: first, the Pharaoh, then 
an *'Achab and Isabella," the story of 
which he told marvellously. 

60 



ANDRE GIVE 



The carriage that is to drive me off is 
ready. Wilde gets in with me to ac- 
company me a Httle distance. He speaks 
of my book, praises it cautiously. The 
carriage stops. Wilde gets out and says 
goodbye; then abruptly: "Look here, 
mon cher, you must promise me some- 
thing. The 'Nourritures Terrestres' is 
good . . . very good. But, mon cher, 
promise me never to write T again. 
In art there is no first person." 

Back in Paris again, I told D my 

news. He declared: 

"All that is quite ridiculous. Wilde 
is incapable of suffering boredom. I 
know him very well; he writes to me 
every day. I dare say he may finish his 
play first, but then he will come back to 
me. He never did anything great in 
solitude, he needs distractions. He wrote 

6i 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

his best while with me. — Look at his 

last letter. . . ," D read it out to 

me. In it Wilde implored D to let 

him finish his Pharaoh in peace; that 
then he would return, return to him. 
The letter closed with this glorious sen- 
tence — "And then I shall be King of 
Life once more!" 

Soon afterward Wilde returned to 
Paris. The play was, and remained, un- 
written. When Society wishes to de- 
stroy a man, she knows what is. needed, 
and she has methods more subtle than 
death. . . . Wilde had for two years 
suffered too much and too passively; his 
will was broken. For the first few 
months he was still able to set up illu- 
sions for himself; but soon he gave up 
even those. It was an abdication. Noth- 
ing was left of his crushed life but the 

62 



ANDRE GIDE 



sorrowful memory of what he had once 
been; some wit still was there; occa- 
sionally he tested it, as if to try whether 
he still was capable of thought; but it 
was a crackling, unnatural, tortured wit. 
I only saw Wilde twice again. 
One evening on the Boulevards, as I 

was walking with G , I heard myself 

called by name. I turn around, it was 
Wilde! How changed he was! "If I 
should reappear before I have written 
my play, the world will see in me only 
the convict," he had said. He had re- 
turned without his play, and when 
some doors closed against him he sought 
entry nowhere else; he turned vagabond. 
Friends often tried to save him; one 
tried to think what was to be done for 
him; one took him to Italy. Wilde soon 
escaped, slipped back. Of those who 

63 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

had remained longest faithful to him, 
some had several times told me that 
Wilde had disappeared. Hence I was, I 
admit, a trifle embarrassed to see him 
again like that, in that place. Wilde 
was sitting on the terrace of a cafe. He 
ordered two cocktails for myself and 

G . I sat down facing him, so that 

my back was to those passing. Wilde 
noticed that and ascribed it to an absurd 
shame on my part, and not altogether, I 
regret to say, with injustice. 

"Oh," he said, ''sit down here, next 
to me," and pointed to a chair by his 
side, "I am so utterly alone now!" 

Wilde was still quite well dressed; but 
his hat no longer was brilliant, his collar 
was still of the old cut, but not quite so 
immaculate, and the sleeves of his coat 
showed faint fringes. 

64 



ANDRE GIDE 



"When once I met Verlaine," he be- 
gan, with a touch of pride, "I did not 
blush at him. I was rich, joyous, famous, 
but I felt that it was an honor for me 
to be seen with Verlaine, even though 
he was drunk." Perhaps because he 

feared to bore G , he suddenly 

changed his tone, attempted to be witty, 
to jest; his talk became mere stumbling. 
As we arose Wilde insisted upon paying. 
When I was bidding him farewell he took 
me aside and said, in a low and confused 
tone, "Listen: you must pay ... I am 
quite without means. . . ." 

A few days later I saw him again for 
the last time. Let me mention but one 
thing of those we talked of: he bewailed 
his inability to undertake his art once 
more. I reminded him of his promise, 
that he had made to himself, not to re- 



65 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

turn to Paris without a completed 
play. 

He interrupted me, laid his hand on 
mine, and looked at me quite sadly: 

"One must ask nothing of one who 
has failed/' 

Oscar Wilde died in a miserable little 
hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts. Seven 
persons followed to his funeral, and not 
all of these accompanied him to his last 
resting-place. Flowers and wreaths lay 
on the coffm. Only one piece bore an 
inscription; it was from his landlord; and 
on it one read these words: ''A mon 
locataire," 



66 



RECOLLECTIONS 

OF 

OSCAR WILDE 

BY 

ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



RECOLLECTIONS 



IF, without looking more closely, one 
happened to notice this slowly mov- 
ing and very solemn gentleman as he 
strolled our boulevards in his expansive 
corpulence, one jumped at once to the 
conclusion that to himself and in him- 
self he appeared as a mourning pro- 
cessional. 

Never was there a more utter victim 
of the misunderstanding between the 
mob and the poet. The public longs 
to be fooled. It has a right to decep- 
tion, as it has a right to bread, or to its 

69 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

dreams — and the real dreams of the 
night-time are so rare and so difficult ! 
It wants to dream, of an evening, in the 
theatre, so that in the daytime it may 
have matter for astonishment and for 
wonder; it wants to be excited, at break 
of day, before work comes, by the mur- 
ders and crimes in the newspapers. 

When once a thaumaturg — and I 
choose the word purposely, one that 
Wilde respected highly — undertakes to 
fool the public, he has the right to 
choose his material where he fmds it; 
one does not expect of him moral and 
social lessons, but inventions, tricks, 
words, a touch of heaven and a touch 
of hell, and what not else; he must be 
Proteus and Prometheus, must be able 
to transform all things, and himself; he 
must reveal the secret of this or that life 

70 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



for the readers of his paper or the patrons 
of his theatre; he must be confessor, 
prophet, and magician; he must dissect 
the world with the exactness of a doc- 
trinarian and recreate it anew the mo- 
ment after, by the Hght of his poetic 
fancy; he must produce formulas and 
paradoxes, and even barbaric puns with 
nothing save their antiquity to save them. 
For this price — a well paid one — he 
can fmd distraction after the manner of 
the gods or the fallen angels, and seek 
for himself excitements and deceptions, 
since he has advanced, and eventually 
crossed the borders of ordinary human 
emotions and sensations. Wilde had 
paid the price. Now, with the coin of 
his artistic triumphs, he longed, among 
a thousand nobler and more interesting 
things, to play the young man. 

71 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

He played badly. 

Now it was the public that was duped 
in duping him. For the only fortune, 
good or bad, permitted to the poet is of 
the sort that an octogenarian biographer 
delights to present after the poet's death. 

Wilde in exile remained always Eng- 
lish: I mean to say that he had pity with 
all victims without hatred for the judges. 
He approved completely of the sentence 
and execution of that Louise Masset who 
was hanged for the killing of her child. 
He followed closely the course of events 
in the Transvaal, and was all enthusiasm 
for Kitchener and Roberts, a touching 
trait in an exile. Irishman by birth, an 
Italian in his inclinations, Greek in cul- 
ture and Parisian in his passion for para- 
dox and blague, he never could forget 
London — London, in whose fogs he had 

72 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



found all his triumphs; London, into 
which he had brought all exotic civilisa- 
tions; London, that in his vanity he had 
transformed into a monstrous garden of 
flowers and palaces, of subtlest sugges- 
tion and discreetest charm. His imper- 
tinences toward the English had been 
those of a benevolent monarch. When 
he came late into a salon, without greet- 
ing to anyone, accosted the hostess and 
asked, quite audibly: ''Do I know any- 
body here?" that was nothing but his 
singular gallantry; he had by no means 
the intention of slighting this one or that 
one, but wished merely to avoid the 
appearance of knowing all the world, 
inasmuch as the hostess herself probably 
knew only a small number of her guests. 
He has been accused of a green carnation 
and a cigarette; it was for that, perhaps, 



73 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

that for twenty-four months he was de- 
prived of all tobacco and all flowers. 
He has been reproached of having spent 
twice the 1 50,000 francs his plays brought 
him in; he was declared bankrupt. His 
name was erased from the hoardings and 
from the memories of men; his children 
were taken away from him; all this be- 
cause the public wished to amaze him 
with its cruelty. 

Still this was not the end. From the 
moment that he set foot on our soil we 
were witnesses to a terrible tragedy: his 
effort to pick up the thread of his life. 
This giant, whom lack of sleep, of nour- 
ishment, of peace and of books, had been 
unable to destroy and scarcely to weaken, 
asked of the sea, of Paris and of Naples, 
that they harbor the dawn of a new era 
in his art. 

74 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



He failed. 

At forty, confident in the future, he 
failed. He could but reach out with 
impotent arms into the past, lose him- 
self in bitter memories. American man- 
agers clamored for a new play of his; all 
he could do was to give Leonard Smithers 
"An Ideal Husband," 1899, to print, a 
play several years old. 

His heavy lids drooped upon cher- 
ished dreams: his successes; he walked 
slowly, in short paces, so as not to dis- 
turb his memories; he loved the solitude 
one gave him, since it left him alone 
with what he had once been. Yet still 
the evil habit was on him of haunting, 
with some companion, the obscurest 
streets, dreaming of similar adventures 
in London. . . . always London! 

He had to have that oblivion which 



75 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

alcohol denied him. For even in the 
bars it was London he sought. There 
was left for him nothing but the Ameri- 
can bars, which were not to his liking. 
One evening at Chatham's he had been 
told his presence was unwelcome. There 
on the terrace he had tried to distract 
his incurious eyes, but the passers-by 
gazed at him too curiously; he gave up 
even that. 

All his face was furrowed by tears. 
His eyes seemed caverns hollowed out 
by pale tears; his heavy lips seemed 
compact of sobs and oozing blood; and 
everywhere was that horrible bloating 
of the skin that signals human fear and 
heartache corroding the body. An un- 
wieldy ghost, an enormous caricature, 
he cowered over a cocktail, always im- 
provising for the curious, for the known, 

76 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



and for the unknown — for anyone — 
his tired and tainted paradoxes. But 
mostly it was for himself he improvised; 
he must assure himself he still could, still 
would, still knew. 

He knew everything. 

Everything. The commentaries on 
Dante; the sources of Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti; the events and the battles of 
history — of all he could talk as a strip- 
ling talks, smiling sometimes his smile 
that was of purgatory, and laughing — 
laughing at nothing, shaking his paunch, 
his jowls, and the gold in his poor teeth. 

Slowly, word for word, he would in- 
vent in his feverish, stumbling agony of 
art, curious, fleeting parables: the story 
of the man who, having received a worth- 
less coin, voyages forth to meet in com- 
bat the ruler whose doubly counterfeit 

77 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

presentment he has found. . . . But he 
lacked, for the setting down of these 
tales, the golden tablet of Seneca. 

He wasted himself in words; perhaps 
he tried to lose himself in them. He 
sought scholars that he might find in 
them an excuse for finding himself 
again, for living anew, for being born 
again, and to keep him from overmuch 
thinking about ungrateful plagiarists. 

Wilde once told a tale of a king and 
a beggar, and said at close: " I have been 
king; now I will be a beggar." Yet he 
remained to the very last day the per- 
fect, well-groomed Englishman — and did 
not beg. 

That would indeed have been a new 
life, this life that fate denied him. 

Words fail to paint properly the chaos 
of hope, of words and laughter, the mad 

78 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



sequence of half-concluded sentences, 
into which this poet plunged, proving to 
himself his still inextinguished fancy, his 
battling against surrender, his smiling 
at fate; or to suggest the grim dark into 
which he always must turn, daily fearing 
death, in the narrow chamber of a sordid 
inn. 

He had been in the country, in Italy, 
and he longed for Spain, for the Mediter- 
ranean; there was nothing for him save 
Paris — a Paris gradually closing against 
him, a deaf Paris, bloodless, heartless, a 
city without eternity and without legend. 

Each day brought him sorrows; he 
had neither followers nor friends; the 
direst neurasthenia tortured him. Want 
clutched at him; the pittance of ten 
francs a day allowed him by his family 
was no longer increased by any advances 

79 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

from his publishers; he must needs work, 
write plays that he had already con- 
tracted to undertake, — and he was 
physically unable to arise from his bed 
before three in the afternoon! 

He did not sour under all this; he 
simply let himself run dov/n. One day 
he takes to his bed, and pretends that 
he has been poisoned by a dish of mus- 
sels in a restaurant; he gets up again, 
but wearily, and with thoughts of death. 

He attempts his stories all over again. 
It is like nothing save the bitter, bhnd- 
ing brilliance of a superhuman firework. 
All who saw him at the close of his career, 
still spraying forth the splendor of his 
wit and his invention, whittling out the 
golden, jeweled fragments of his genius, 
with which he was to fashion and em- 
broider the plays and poems he still 

80 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



meant to do — who saw him proudly 
lifting his face to the stars the while he 
coughed his last words, his last laughter, 
— will never forget the tremendous, 
tragic spectacle as of one calmly damned 
yet proudly refusing utterly to bend the 
neck. 

Nature, at last kind to him who had 
denied her, gathered all her glories to- 
gether for him in the Exposition. He 
died of its passing, as he died of every- 
thing. He had loved it, had drunk it in 
large measures, greedily, as one drinks 
blood on the battlefield. In every palace 
of it he built again his own palace of 
fame, riches, and immortality. 

For this dying man it was a long and 
lovely dream. One day he passed out 
through the Porte de TAlma to look at 
Rodin's work. He was almost the only 

8i 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

wayfarer thither. That, too, is tragedy; 
and the master showed him, quite near 
by, the Porte de TEnfer. 

But enough of details; on to the end. 

Thirteen persons, in a bedroom out 
by the city hmits, remove their hats 
before a coffin marked with a No. 13; a 
shaky hearse with shabby metal orna- 
ments; two landaus instead of a funeral 
coach; a wreath of laurel; faded flowers; 
a church that is not draped for death, 
that tolls no death-note, and opens only 
a narrow side-entrance for the procession; 
a dumb and empty mass without music; 
an absolution intoned in English, the 
liturgic Latin turned to a non-conformist 
jumble; the glittering salute of a captain 
of the guard on the Place Saint Germain- 
des-Pres; three reporters counting the 
participants with cold-blooded precision 

82 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



— that is the farewell that the world 
takes from one of its children, from one 
who had wished to illuminate and spread 
far the splendor of its dream; — that is 
the knell of a life of phantasms and of 
dreams of impossible beauty; — that is 
the forgiveness and the recompense; — 
that, on a false dawn, is the first rosy 
light of immortality. 

Wilde, who was a Catholic, received 
but two sacraments: the first while in a 
coma, the last in his last sleep. The 
priest who looked after him was bearded 
and English; seemed himself a convert. 
In all justice I would assert here that 
Wilde was sincerely enough a Catholic 
not to have need of the last rites; that he 
devoutly loved all the Romish pomp and 
ceremony, even to the color-effects of the 
stained windows and the notes of the 



83 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR V/ILDE 

organ; and that some of all this might 
rightly have been his due, rather than 
this stolid farce, this hasty burying, this 
oppressive absolution, in which the vicar 
seemed to be washing his hands clean of 
this taint of unrighteousness. 

It was in our hearts, in us, that the 
true religion was. 

I cannot judge, cannot praise, Oscar 
Wilde here. Properly to seize and set 
forth his curious genius were a greater 
task. One will not fmd that genius in 
his writings. Witty and sublime it is, 
there; but, for him, too piecemeal. His 
work is the shadow of his thoughts, the 
shadow of his illuminating speech. 

One must conceive him as one who 
knew everything and said everything in 
the best way. A Brummel, who was a 
Brummel even in his genial moments. 

84 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



And one who would have fulfilled that 
part while tasting of shame and of un- 
happiness. 

None believed in Art more than Wilde. 

I will close this oration by an illusion 
to his simplicity. Wilde, who suffered 
so much, suffered under his reputation 
of being affected. One evening Wilde, 
who was not usually fond of publicly 
deploring his lost treasures, lamented his 
paternity. After he had told me of his 
son Vivian's conversion to the Catholic 
faith, the boy having quite simply de- 
clared to his guardian '' I am a Catholic," 
Wilde said with a smile, "And Vivian, 
twelve years old, lies down on a couch, 
and when they wish him to get up, says; 
'Leave me — I am thinking!' with a 
gesture, mind you, of my own — a ges- 
ture that people have jeered at and of 

85 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

which they have always declared it was 
affected!" That was the beginning of a 
rehabilitation among the mob. 

And now the grandson of this Math- 
urin, who admired Balzac, from whom 
this unfortunate borrowed his fatal pseu- 
donym of Sebastian Melmoth, sleeps; he 
sleeps, this son of a noble and learned 
father and mother, at whose christening 
stood a King of Sweden; sleeps, and 
sleeps badly, in a churchyard that is far 
enough away to choke the courage and 
the prayers of whoso might wish to ven- 
ture there. Hardly will the echo of bor- 
rowed fables wake or lull him. Hardly 
will the occasional utterance of his name 
in scandal reach him, bringing its burden 
of insult. 

He will, I hope, pardon me these 
words, uttered only for history, for sin- 

86 



ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 



cerity and for justice, and to be witnesses 
for one who was his friend in evil days, 
who is neither aesthetic nor cynic, and 
who in all humility sends greeting to him 
in his silence and his peace. 



87 



RECOLLECTIONS 

OF 

OSCAR WILDE 

BY 

FRANZ BLEI 



RECOLLECTIONS 



LIFE is frightfully devoid of form. 
Its catastrophes occur in the wrong 
places and to the wrong people. Gro- 
tesque horror plays round about its 
comedies, and its tragedies wind up in 
farce. It wounds you when you would 
approach it; it lasts too long or too 
briefly." 

If one seek an example to these senti- 
ments, one would fmd none better than 
the life of him who uttered them. For 
every word of Oscar Wilde's came true 
in his own case, up to that one which 

91 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

declared that Art, and Art alone, could 
safeguard us against the soiling dangers 
of life. His passion for discovering the 
ways that fare between Truth and 
Beauty led him into discredited paths 
that spelt anathema to the conventional; 
he believed he could tread those ways 
safely, since he carried before him the 
illumining torch of Beauty. But Life 
always wounds those who approach it 
from dreams. And Wilde, like his own 
Dorian, had moments in which he saw 
evil only as a means towards realising 
his conception of the beautiful, and so 
one saw him consorting with evil. He 
recognised sin as the only thing that in 
our time has kept color and life, and that 
we cannot hark back to holiness and can 
learn far more from the sinner. As 
Dorian was, so was he a type that our 

92 



FRANZ BLEI 



times desires strongly and yet fears, that 
we picture to ourselves in secret fancies 
and worshippings and yet crucify when 
it comes to life. For not yet is there one 
law over both thought and deed, and we 
must be grateful to this divorce for our 
scheme of life, without which our world 
would be the richer only for one animal 
without sin. 

Wilde's literary residue would be im- 
portant enough to secure his name to 
posterity. But his life encountered a 
fate that took precedence, with its gro- 
tesque tragedy, over his work, and over- 
shadowed it scurrilously with a blackness 
that, in England, was as a night of pesti- 
lence. One may almost admire the 
stupid power for cruelty in such a people 
that — peer and butcher-boy acting as 
one man — dealt out to its one-time 



93 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

darling a two years' torture, and, not 
satisfied with that, wished to stamp out 
even the memory of him as of one in- 
famous. One must needs explain this 
cruelty as a mob outbreak of Sadism, 
not to be found altogether extraordinary 
there, where flagellation marks the high- 
est plane of erotic culture. 

English society is always ruled by a 
dandy, and not only since the days of 
Brummel and Selwyn. The greater the 
dandy, the more absolute his rule. 
Wilde was the acknowledged master and 
tyrant; he lashed that society and spared 
not, and it cringed before him, since he 
was dandy by the grace of God. Magic 
words he had, that paradoxically sub- 
jugated the truths of to-morrow. Yet 
somewhere a lover hides always in his 
scabbard of senseless love a dagger of 

94 



FRANZ BLEI 



hate that some day is bared and kills the 
beloved. Wilde was both a dandy and 
a genius; democracy can suffer neither 
in the long run. 

"Dandyism is simply a manner of 
being, and is not to be made in any way 
tangibly visible.'' One notes from this 
sentence that Barbey d'Aurevilly does 
not insist upon the importance of the 
dandy's more specific arts — of body 
and vesture — as compared to the beauti- 
fully shaded art that miay be achieved by 
mere living. This is wrong. One may 
live one's life in the most delicate shad- 
ings, may dress and act as a dandy, and 
yet remain, like Whistler, merely a 
painter. It is the visible, material ele- 
ments that compose the importance of 
the whole. The dandy is, before all else, 
a decorative artist, whose material is his 



95 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

own body. That seems but a slight 
matter. But, if all the world went 
naked, one would have a higher and 
better valuation of the one exception 
that went clothed. The dandy is an 
artist. He is egoistic as an artist, de- 
lights, like him, to deal with the world, 
and feels, like the artist, most in his ele- 
ment when conspicuously alone. Only 
one distinction I would draw between 
them, and that is upon a point of art: 
that of the dandy is unselfish, since he 
offers it to all who wish to see. One 
error should be scouted: clerks and dig- 
nitaries who happen to dress exagger- 
atedly are by no means dandies. Not 
all who versify are poets. The clerks 
and the dignitaries may compose their 
toilettes as finely as they will; they are 
still primarily clerks and dignitaries. 

96 



FRANZ BLEI 



Dandyism, too, like every other art, has 
its dilettanti. But here is the case: the 
whole being of the dandy must be full of 
his art; all that he does, says, and thinks, 
must emanate from his dandyism. And! 
unlike other artists, he may never be 
less than his work; on this or that point 
his personality must always loom as the 
greater — greater than all the sum of all 
his powers that only come singly to 
utterance. A dandy will say that a 
really well arranged bouquet for the 
buttonhole is the only thing that joins 
art and nature, for he has seen it as life's 
first duty to be as artistic as possible, 
and knows that the second duty has not 
yet been discovered. 

No dandy has more conscientiously 
fulfilled this duty than Wilde; later days 
proved that in this fulfilment he had 

97 . 



RECOLLECTIONS OF OSCAR WILDE 

spent his genius. He wrote occasion- 
ally, when he had no audience; for as a 
dandy he was of the type that spends its 
life declaiming. No poet ever set art 
above nature more nobly than Wilde, for 
his ambition was not to be a poet, but 
more than that: a dandy. He dreamed 
of an abstract beauty that might never 
run into the danger of losing itself in life, 
since it never arose out of life, — of a 
beauty that would prove nothing, that 
would not even have any intrinsic pur- 
pose. For even this conscious purpose 
in beauty seemed to him only, at best, a 
moral pose in disguise. 

It is not in his writings that one will 
find this strange man's genius; only a 
shadow of it is there. One who, like 
Wilde, does not centre his artistic tem- 
perament upon a single expression, upon 

98 



FRANZ BLEI 



the art and craft of a single book or a 
single poem, but utters it rather in his 
whole living and being, will achieve in 
his books and poems only the fragmentary 
that even to himself must seem slight, 
and that must always be subject for his 
own irony. "All bad writing is the 
result of sincere feeling" — Wilde as- 
serted that when he was at the height of 
his fame, when he ranked the poet and 
poetry far beneath dandyism, and gladly 
deserted poetry in favor of success as 
dandy. Only when he was neglected 
and despised and ill and miserable, sin- 
cere feeling bred in him his one great 
poem: The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He 
could assert his paradox only as a dandy; 
as poet he went counter to it. Then he 
had fashioned art into his life; now life 
fashioned him to his art. 



99 

LOFCa 



THE WORKS of 
OSCAR WILDE 



The Plays of Oscar Wilde. 

In Three Volumes, containing, " Lady Winder- 
mere's Fan," "A Woman of No Importance," 
"An Ideal Husband," " The Importance of Being 
Earnest," " Salome," " Duchess of Padua," and 
" Vera; or The Nihilists." Cloth, gilt top, 3 vols., 
boxed, $3.75 net. Vols. I and II, $2.50 net., Vol. 
Ill, sold separately, $1.50 net. 

Salome. 

Oscar Wilde's remarkable tragedy. A special 
edition with the original illustrations by Aubrey 
Beardsley, printed on Japan vellum. Text 
printed on heavy deckel-edge paper; bound in 
black cloth with Beardsley design in gold, gilt 
top. $1.00 net. 

Epigrams and Aphorisms, by Oscar Wilde. A 
complete collection, embracing the entire range 



of Wilde's prose work, and preserving in concise 
form the essence of the author's best efforts. 
Bound in half leather, and printed on heavy 
deckel-edge paper. $1.50. 

The Renaissance of English Art, by Oscar 
Wilde. An essay on Art and ^estheticism de- 
livered as a lecture during his American tour. 
Cloth, $0.50 net. 

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde. 
A poem, in which the author rises to a height of 
poetic expression that has not been surpassed 
in English during the past fifty years. Cloth, 
$0.50 net. 

The Canterville Ghost, by Oscar Wilde. An 
amusing chronicle of the tribulations of the 
Ghost of Canterville Chase, when his ancestral 
halls became the home of the American minister 
to the Court of St. James. Rich in humor and 
satire. Cloth, gilt top, $1.00. 

JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY 
Boston and London 




-'^ * iSil^^ " "^ A^' Treatment Date: May 2009 

\. °^^^^* c?^n PreservationTechnologies , ,^ 

-^ o|V^^\K_^* <^ ^^ A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION ^ 

>. *^Q >i"* a'^ ^ 111 Thomson Park Drive ^ 

^^^ • * A^ Cranberiv Township, PA 16066 ' 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. ' 



Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 



^A 



?b^ 



^v. 
^ 



N e , 



Cranberry Township, 
(724)779-2111 




^ OCT 68 

*^l^ N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




